Here my life has gone on--a busy, eventful, and, I trust, a useful one, among persons grievously afflicted, hampered as they are by vagaries and abnormalities, yet capable of tender affection, of keen appreciation for services rendered, and of a degree of companionship it would be hard for an outsider to comprehend. It has been a life rich in compensations, whatever of deprivation and of limitation it has held; above all, a life rich in friendships--friendships staunch and leal and priceless. And it has been crowned in the later years with a signal friendship which has yielded a measureless satisfaction--a friendship and comradeship with one whom the world calls great, yet who made a place in his heart and life for the “Child of the Drumlins,” as he was wont to name her. The termination of this record at the beginning of a new epoch in the writer’s life--an epoch when all the lines of character were converging to maturity--gives the reader of necessity a sense of incompleteness. The whole record, as I try to see it from the reader’s point of view, seems to be like “one stone stair ... Ascending, winding, leading up to naught,” because perforce the superstructure is missing. Yet one who follows the writer’s efforts to gain the image of her own soul may perhaps learn herein the better to know his own and also the souls of others; learn, too, that each of us proceeds on the lines of his own development; and that all that comes into the mature life is but an extension, an unfolding, of all that went before. “Our to-days and yesterdays _are_ the blocks with which we build.” Would that we had builded better! If it were possible to treat the subsequent epochs as candidly as the earlier ones are here treated, they would not be found lacking in moving events, in dramatic moments, even in tragedies--some in the lives of those closely knit to one’s own, some of the soul only, some in the outer life--but all this cannot be viewed objectively; it is too close--it is a life of yesterday and to-day, while the other, detached, and seen through the Spell of the Past, is as a tale that is told. THE END